by Joshua Zeitz
But spells as genial on our souls employs
As when Greek sunsets poured their purple dyes
In wasteful splendor on blind Homer’s eyes.
It was never likely that Hay’s family could afford to indulge his pursuit of a writer’s life, and he knew it. Still basking in the triumph of his poetic glory, John sent a good-bye letter to Hannah Angell. “When I look around me & see my trunk packed & observe the general look of confusion that a room has when everything is over, I begin to realize that I have completed my self-immolation,” he confided to Hannah. “Today I am surprised, tomorrow I will be stunned, the next day I will see some friends whose faces will galvanize me into a mockery of life, in a week I will be at home sharing in the pathetic joy of kindred, & in a month I will be busy.” With all the histrionics that a nineteen-year-old college graduate could muster, John hoped that he might “find rest and peace in the tumult of the West, & feel an inner calm . . . Whether I am ‘snuffed’ out young or die old & sordid, I shall remember that I lived one year in Providence [and] wrote a poem (you never saw it).” In closing, Hay reminded his college sweetheart that there would soon be “a young man in Warsaw, Illinois, that is going to the P.O. three times a day & looking like a pious Moslem, to the East.”
August found Hay in a melancholy and melodramatic mood. Back home with his parents, he whiled away the last days of summer writing dreamy letters to his friends in Providence and longing for “the ‘goodbye lands’” that he had left all of two weeks earlier. He told Nora Perry that he had cast off the world and was content to “go to my room to convene with shadows.” He wrote love poems and sent them to Hannah Angell. He struck up a correspondence with William O’Connor, a Philadelphia poet of middling reputation. Counting himself as one of the “faithless nomads of the prairies,” he predicted that all of his “ties and associations formed in the East” would soon be “dissolved by the air of Illinois.” Four months later, he professed still to “turn my eyes Eastward, like an Islamite, when I feel prayerful,” and told Nora that if she “loved Providence as I do, you would congratulate yourself hourly on your lot.” The West, he complained, was “a dreary waste of heartless materialism . . . [I]n time, I shall change. I shall turn from ‘the rose and the rainbow’ to corner lots and tax-titles, and a few years will find my eye not rolling in a fine frenzy, but steadily fixed on the pole-star of humanity, $!” In an especially self-pitying dispatch to Whitman, he cast himself as “an exile in the West.” It was time, Hay decided—about two months into his postcollegiate career—to “give up my dreams” and “turn my attention to those practical studies which are to minister to material wants in the West.” In short, he was miserable.
None of this was lost on Charles Hay, who indulged John’s indefinite summer vacation for several weeks but soon grew concerned by his son’s aimless drift. Charles admitted to his brother, Milton, that he was “somewhat undecided as to what course” John should take. The family discussed the idea of his entering the teaching profession, but both Mrs. Hay and Augustus, the eldest of the Hay children, were opposed to the idea, as “it would neither suit his self-esteem nor his pecuniary wants.” Augustus wanted John to return to Brown, earn a graduate degree, and write for “Eastern periodicals until a time and opening offered for taking a high position somewhere.” But the family could ill afford to subsidize another eastern adventure, and Charles was not about to ask Milton (who had paid John’s undergraduate expenses) to foot the bill for another year. Some of John’s friends urged “him to turn his attention immediately to the law, while others, especially some valued ones at the East, advise him to turn his attention at once and wholly to literature.” Dr. Hay was not opposed to his son’s pursuit of a literary life, but he wanted him “to have some profession upon which he can fall back, or rather rise upon, while he is rising, higher. He is restless and wishes to know his destiny, although he expects me to decide for him entirely.”
Charles and his brother agreed on a course of action that was designed to please everyone. Guided by Milton, John would begin independent legal studies, in preparation for a clerkship in his uncle’s office. At the same time, he would pursue whatever literary and scholarly opportunities came his way. It was a good enough plan, but for one problem: John had no interest in the profession.
“I am not making the most rapid progress in the law,” he admitted to Milton in January 1859. “I have, as you advised, read all of Hume consecutively, and, to speak with moderation, remember some of it. I would then immediately have made an attack upon Blackstone, had I not been prevented for a while by the distemper that has troubled me more or less all season.” What John had done, in lieu of working through Blackstone’s Commentaries, was spend several weeks researching and writing a lecture on the history of the Jesuit order, for presentation to the local Warsaw “Literary Institute.” In the wake of his lecture, close friends suggested in jest that he make a career of the pulpit. “I would not do for a Methodist preacher,” he told Milton, “for I am a poor horseman. I would not suit the Baptists, for I dislike water. I would fail as an Episcopalian, for I am no ladies’ man.” Instead, he was politely resigned to furthering his legal studies. “They would spoil a first-class preacher to make a third-class lawyer of me,” he quipped.
By spring, the family had decided that it was time for John to clerk for his uncle Milton, who had moved his law office to nearby Springfield. “I am hardly in a situation to begin anything,” Hay complained to Hannah Angell. “I alternate between weeks of sickness and months of my normal condition of chronic worthlessness. How it will end does not seem difficult to say. The only question is one of time. In the meanwhile I will read the Law. John Doe & Richard Roe shall displace the airy forms that have guided my dreams.”
Milton Hay’s law office was on the second floor of a three-story brick building, directly in the center of town, on the western side of the city’s State Capitol Square. In a nearby suite were the offices of Abraham Lincoln and William Herndon. (As a young man, Milton had clerked under Lincoln.) A former one-term congressman and twice-failed candidate for the U.S. Senate, Lincoln was a known personality in Springfield, but only a small group of loyalists thought he might be presidential timber. None of the chatter registered strongly with John. Even a year later, amid the tension and fever pitch of the 1860 presidential campaign, as Lincoln’s political handlers were openly plotting a bold strategy to secure the nomination for their candidate, he wrote to Hannah that his “insanity has not yet changed its form from rhyme to politics. Young men generally glide very naturally in their invocations from the muses to the masses and remove the shrine of their worship from Castalia to Congress. But I am as yet innocent of politics.” Hay thought well enough of Lincoln but generally liked to “occupy myself very pleasantly in thoroughly hating both sides, and abusing the peculiar tenets of the company I happen to be in, and when the company is divided, in saying with Mercutio, ‘A plague on both your houses.’ This position of dignified neutrality I expect to hold for a very long time unless Lincoln is nominated at Chicago.”
Though in the ensuing months he continued to write a flurry of self-pitying letters to his eastern correspondents, for the most part Hay buckled down and settled into his studies. In due course, Springfield offered charms of its own, and he developed a circle of friends and intimates. But he continued to view himself as a transient and an observer. “I am very easily contented, in whatever sphere I may be placed,” he assured his uncle Milton before taking up his clerkship, “and can always wait for the tide of circumstances without any inconvenience.”
Sometime during his first days in Springfield, with nothing better to do, John Hay took a walk over to the capitol building to visit his old friend John Nicolay. It was in this way that the tide of circumstances intervened.
CHAPTER 2
The Homes of Free White People
While John Hay was hatching plans to achieve literary glory and escape indefinite exile
in the “barbarous” West, the country in which he lived was consumed by an increasingly bitter debate over slavery. A contemporary observer noted that when one entered the home of even the most ordinary farmer, “the grand theme is politics; and you will be surprised by the sense and readiness with which he speaks on the most intricate national questions.” Not so John Hay. Most striking about his papers in this period is the near-total absence of current affairs. Living in a decade of profound turmoil, he had little to say. In a letter to his uncle Milton, dated early 1856, John noted in passing that he had attended a Republican Party rally. But on the great topics of the day—the Fugitive Slave Act, the extension of slavery into the western territories, the rise of a new antislavery political movement—he was almost completely silent.
Over the preceding quarter century—from the late 1820s through the 1840s—American politics had been dominated by two political parties, Whigs and Democrats, who disagreed on a host of issues concerning political economy. Debates over the national banking system, tariffs, internal improvements, soft (that is, paper) versus hard (that is, metal) money, and workingmen’s rights largely defined the antebellum political discussion, and for the most part both parties enjoyed strong bisectional support. By the late 1840s, the political system had come under severe strain, in part because many of the defining questions of the era found resolution. Andrew Jackson had killed the Second Bank of the United States, thus sucking the air out of a highly charged debate over the institution’s value and constitutionality. Broad consensus emerged that the states, not the national government, were chiefly responsible for financing infrastructure projects. The California gold rush flooded the country with additional “specie,” temporarily alleviating the demand for paper currency and ending the debate over the propriety of printing it. The parties continued to debate tariff levels, but even that subject no longer inspired the passion that it had when Andrew Jackson occupied the White House. Increasingly, Whigs and Democrats strained to identify meaningful policy disagreements. All that it would take to loosen the voters’ allegiances to the existing two parties was a new, salient issue. And that issue was ultimately slavery.
On the evening of Saturday, August 8, 1846, as Congress neared adjournment, David Wilmot, a Democratic congressman from northwestern Pennsylvania, approached the well of the House chamber and submitted an amendment to a routine military appropriations bill. It was an unusually hot and sticky night—even for Washington, D.C.—and most of Wilmot’s colleagues were eager to flee the swamplike conditions of the capital city for cooler parts. At the time, the United States was engaged in a war with Mexico that it would ultimately win and that would bring the country into possession of lands that later formed all or part of modern-day California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming. The introduction of these vast new territories raised a question that Americans had not had to address for almost thirty years: Should Congress permit the institution of slavery to expand beyond its current borders? The Wilmot Proviso, as it came to be known, opened a Pandora’s box by barring the institution in all newly acquired Mexican land. The amendment passed the House on a purely sectional vote, but Southern strength in the Senate prevented it from becoming law. Astute observers understood the significance of the event. Whigs and Democrats had failed to contain a burgeoning sectional conflict over the spread of slavery. “As if by magic,” noted a reporter for the Boston Whig, “it brought to a head the great question that is about to divide the American people.” Even President James Polk, the chief architect of the Mexican War, privately feared that “the slavery question is assuming a fearful . . . aspect” and might “ultimately threaten the Union itself.”
Since Congress enacted the Missouri Compromise in 1820, Americans had accepted as established fact that the 36˚30´ parallel demarcated the line between the free and the slave states. Below the line, slavery was permitted; above it, it was banned. But the Missouri Compromise applied strictly to those territories that the United States had procured from France in the Louisiana Purchase. It had no bearing on the new lands that the United States acquired during the Mexican War. Because most of the Mexican cession fell beneath the Missouri Compromise line, many Southerners naturally felt that it ought to be open to slavery. Most Northerners disagreed. Foreseeing an inevitable conflict, Ralph Waldo Emerson warned at the outset of the war that “the United States will conquer Mexico, but it will be as the man swallows arsenic, which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us.” Events later proved Emerson right.
As it had so many times in the past, Congress managed to delay the sectional clash by hammering out a series of accommodations. Originally conceived by Henry Clay and shepherded through the Senate by Stephen A. Douglas, a rising Democratic star from Illinois, the Compromise of 1850 split the baby in two. California entered the Union as a free state, but the citizens of other former Mexican territories were left to make their own determinations about slavery. Congress abolished the slave trade, but not slavery, in Washington, D.C., and created a more stringent fugitive slave law. Inasmuch as the compromise created a pathway to organize the former Mexican territories and temporarily settled the slavery question, it was a success. But storm clouds lurked on the horizon. Douglas was unable to secure passage of the compromise in “omnibus” form and had to break it into its component pieces to move it through the Senate. Majorities in each section opposed those provisions that were likely to offend their constituencies, raising quiet concern that the package was no compromise at all but rather a series of short-term expediencies meant to avoid civil war.
Despite its framers’ hopes that the Compromise of 1850 would stanch sectional animosities, at least one of its components backfired. The new Fugitive Slave Act inspired widespread disgust throughout the North. The law stripped accused runaways of their right to trial by jury and allowed individual cases to be bumped up from state courts to special federal courts. As an extra incentive to federal commissioners adjudicating such cases, it provided a $10 fee when a defendant was remanded to slavery but only $5 for a finding rendered against the slave owner. Most obnoxious to many Northerners, the law stipulated harsh fines and prison sentences for any citizen who refused to cooperate with or aid federal authorities in the capture of accused fugitives.
Though resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act was not widespread, several high-profile cases caused a political firestorm. In Boston, an angry mob assailed two Georgians who came north to retrieve Ellen and William Craft, a black couple who had escaped from slavery two years earlier. The Crafts were celebrated runaways; nobody claimed that theirs was a case of mistaken identity. Citizens of Boston nevertheless held the slave catchers at bay while Theodore Parker and friends spirited them to Canada. A similar scene occurred months later, when slave catchers from Virginia came to retrieve Shadrach Minkins, a runaway from Norfolk. As the fugitive awaited his hearing before a federal magistrate, “we heard a shout from across the courthouse,” recalled Richard H. Dana Jr., whose office window overlooked the melee, “continued into a yell of triumph, and in an instant after down the steps came two negroes bearing the prisoner between them with his clothes half torn off, and so stupefied by his sudden rescue and the violence of the dragging off that he sat almost dumb, and I thought had fainted . . . It was all done in an instant, too quick to be believed.”
When federal marshals in Boston arrested Anthony Burns in 1854, a vigilance committee gathered at Faneuil Hall and declared that “resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.” Heavily armed with axes and pistols, they marched to the courthouse, where, in the ensuing battle, a federal officer was killed. In response, President Franklin Pierce, a Northern Democrat, mobilized the U.S. Army and Navy to transport Burns back to Virginia, at a cost of $100,000 (roughly equivalent to $4 million in 2012). As soldiers escorted the fugitive down the streets of Boston, church bells tolled in somber protest, and homeowners and shopkeepers turned their American flags upside down in a show of de
fiance. “I saw . . . the lawyers’ offices hung in black,” wrote a bystander. “I saw the cavalry, artillery, marines, and police, a thousand strong, escorting with shotted guns one trembling colored man to the vessel which was to carry him to slavery. I heard the curses, both loud and deep, poured over these soldiers; I saw the red flush in their cheeks as the crowd yelled at them, ‘Kidnappers! Kidnappers!’” Even conservative “Cotton” Whigs—New Englanders with strong political and business ties to the plantation South—found the whole affair “odious and hateful.” George Hillard, a prominent attorney, witnessed Burns’s arrest firsthand. “When it was all over,” he told a friend, “and I was left alone in my office, I put my face in my hands and wept. I could do nothing less.” His townsman Amos Lawrence, a fellow Cotton Whig, spoke for many people when he wrote, “We went to bed one night old fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs & waked up stark mad Abolitionists.”
Northern opposition to slavery sprang from diverse sources. On one end of the spectrum, abolitionists like Theodore Parker, William Lloyd Garrison, and Wendell Phillips believed that African Americans were human beings, entitled to the same rights and liberties as white men and women. Closely allied with these reformers were radical antislavery politicians like Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, Joshua Giddings and Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, and Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, whose moral opposition to slavery stemmed from a commitment to racial equality. In this position, they were well ahead of their time.
Somewhere on the other side of the spectrum, many conservative Whigs and Democrats harbored intensely negrophobic sentiments but opposed slavery because they believed that the institution placed white yeomen farmers at a disadvantage. If Southerners could import slave labor into the territories, free white homesteaders could never compete on a level playing field. Typical of this perspective was David Wilmot, who denied any “squeamish . . . sensitiveness” or “morbid sympathy for the slave.” Rather, he complained that “the negro race already occupy enough of this fair continent . . . I would preserve for free white labor a fair country . . . where the sons of toil, of my own race and own color, can live without the disgrace which association with negro slavery brings upon free labor.”